Commissioned by  flippedoutkyrii

While not the first of the three concurrent commissions occupying my art efforts in the latter half of 2016, this is nevertheless the first to make it across the finish line. Owing largely to it being just a pencil drawing, but in the end much more advanced than a pencil con-sketch...Or, most at-home sketch commissions now that I think about it. For the setup, I'm going to quote the commissioner's outline, as I think it best describes what's going on:

Sgt. Cora "Redfield" Brown, a combat medic in the British SAS, partook in an operation along a Caribbean Island chain with a couple of air-dropped squads and a small detachment of Mercenaries acting as Liaisons for the local navy.

Thankfully, MI6 intelligence was shaky and they greatly overestimated the enemy numbers, their training and their armaments. The moment they kicked in the door was the moment the SAS declared victory without ever firing a single bullet.

However, a tropical storm down the island chain would prevent air-lift for the next few days, leaving the SAS operatives and the Mercenaries to their own devices until the storm and sea's would eventually calm.

What better time to celebrate their victory by commandeering the terrorists beer kegs?

Relaxing on a sunny beach with a storm far off into the horizon, the men and women of both armed squad's slinked out of their combat gear and enjoyed the breeze. Cora held back despite the welcoming gestures of her own squadmates and kept to herself.

She had a good enough reason too. She and the mercenary leader, Amira Sashenka, had some prior encounters that weren't exactly on friendly terms. Amira herself decided to drink enough beer to knock down a horse, so her decisions were less collective and methodical compared to her more sober actions.

Cora slinked out of some of her gear regardless and walked down the beach on her own, enjoying the air on her fur, the sand beneath her treads and the salt water washing over her boots. She especially enjoyed the latter sensation, having spent most of the day walking through the humid jungle.

However, Amira quietly followed. Despite her muscular 6.5 frame, she had a knack for sneaking up on her targets

Cora, while enjoying the view, offhand mentions how this is quite the picturesque birthday. Finding the ammunition she needed to reel in Cora, Amira smirks and grabs the Vixens tail, announcing in a drunken manner that they need to give her a proper birthday celebration!

Unnerved, Cora quickly tries to brush off the announcement but Amira proves to be too vocal in her drunken state and drags Cora along as she strides back to the campfire, ready to create lasting memories that will surely embarrass the sober Vixen for many years to come.

And now you know...the rest of the story. Well not quite--there is the matter of actually drawing the thing which I usually talk about.

Technical:
This pic took longer than typical for a pencil sketch since as you can see it is waaaay beyond a sketch. That's probably my personal asthetic at work. It turned the scene into one of the most detailed pencil pics I've done. So detailed that I made the decision to have it span two sheets of paper, so the original is actually 11x17 inches (28x43cm), the biggest 'canvas' I've worked on to date. Since these two characters have a lot of details related to their backgrounds being military-involved, I frequently stopped to garner input from the commissioner to make sure I got 'em right. (not to mention the two other paid-in-advance commissions I was switching back and forth with this one)

Probably the most time-consuming step was cleaning up the pencils, since anyone who has worked with them knows how much smudging you get when working on a pencil piece for a significant amount of time. And that's the stuff you can see on the physical page. Once you scan them at 300dpi, you get introduced to a whole new world of schmutz that needs to be removed, details to be cleaned out, sketch lines that didn't quite erase, and double lines from turning light sketch lines into final pencils.

Both characters were drawn separately, then the pages joined together and the backdrop added. Of course you can't scan an 11x17 pic in one go, so I also digitally stitched the two images, removed the seam then patched the lines crossing the location of that artifact. Owing to the sheer size of the original, this is larger than my customary 750-ish pixel-on-the-short-side dimensions, and somewhat larger data size than my usual color images.

Pencil on twin letter-size bristol. Digitally stitched together and cleaned up with Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Single layer scan (aside from logo/text) 48MB bitmap at original full size (5110x3332)